Mini-Heap: recent items from the Heap of Links, collected in groups of 10, here for your perusal and discussion…

1. “Few people are capable of characterizing their own research to professional peers” — reflections on the academic cover letter
2. Science popularizer Bill Nye changes mind about philosophy — “Bring it on,” he says (◔_◔)
3. “A messy and perhaps inelegant conception of how psychological kinds stand in relation to other scientific kinds” — Thomas Polger & Lawrence Shapiro on why multiple realizability isn’t complicated enough
4. “Your brain acts as if your future self is someone you don’t know very well and, frankly, someone you don’t care about” — brain imaging and the bias towards the near
5. “Death does not solve the problem of life’s cosmic meaninglessness and will often… diminish the kind of meaning that is attainable” — a brief interview with David Benatar (Cape Town) on The Human Predicament
6. You don’t need to be a dirt-loving tree-hugger to act in environmentally friendly ways — Ben Hale (Colorado) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
7. “What we see is constantly informed by what we know and what we were thus already busy (both consciously and non-consciously) expecting.” — Andy Clark (Edinburgh) on brains as “prediction machines”
8. They work. But we don’t know quite how. — on our understanding of current artificial intelligence
9. Kurt Vonnegut’s writing advice — culled from several sources
10. What was the universe like before The Big Bang? — some speculation from Sean Carroll and others